On Monday, 17 September many users of Path application were shocked by the news of it is Shutting down. Does path considered as a failure? where path went wrong
:Joining the market
path joined the market of social networking in November 2010 challenging many social networking sites who dominate the market as Facebook,twitter and later Instagram that launched at October of the same year.
The company was founded by Shawn fanning and former Facebook executive Dave Morin. Path provided many services as uploading pictures tagging people and provided a private environment by limiting each user’s social network to 50 friends at first and that what made path different of other social networking sites.
:Way to success
Path subsequently raised $30 million in venture capital from Redpoint Ventures. On January 11, 2014, the company announced it had raised another $25 million in venture funding from Indonesian Bakrie Group, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and First Round Capital.
on 2014, many Arabian users of Twitter shifted to Path and it was the trend at the time till now. It had a domestic success in Arabian countries and in Indonesia but not internationally, their database recorded 4 million Indonesian users as their largest number and Saudis users comes at the second place.
:Scandal
On Februray 2012, many users were not comfortable by using the app knowing that the company were accessing and storing user phone contacts without knowledge or permission of users.
Users were attracted to the app because of it is privacy in the first place and these practices caused a lot of critical, after that the CEO of the company apologized and promised to change .its practices
unfortunately on February 2013, it turns out that the company were storing data from underage users, therefore the company was fined eight hundred thousand dollar by Federal Trade Commission.The company will be required to have its privacy policies assessed every two years for the next twenty years. Along with the civil penalty, Federal Trade Commission has prohibited Path from making any misrepresentations about the extent it maintains confidentiality of its users’ personal data
:Closing
As I mentioned before path shocked their users by the news of it’s closing on September 17, many users does not understand why would application like Path would close, specially Arabian .users
If Path was domestic application in Arabs countries it would have many success and wouldn’t close, there are a lot of application who focus on local markets as kakao talk in Korea, Line in japan and Weibo in china. you may not heard of these application but it’s the most used application in these countries. In Path is case they started as worldwide networking site but they did not meet their hopes. In 2015 it is founders Shawn fanning, Dustin Mierau and Dave Morin tried to save the program by selling it to kakao corporation and that helped in the promoting of the program but their main reason to selling the program have not achieved.
Daum Kakao was manage path through a subsidiary, and tried to develop many features as video streaming, tagging friends to bring them into conversation and a more stable application, but path failed to attract new users in the United state and other countries, they have some loyal users but lack of new users.
the program started as closed networking site and that was the main reason for killing the expansion of the program, this feature made path different for Arabian users who prefer privacy because of our culture but this feature was disadvantage in other markets. path realized this problem and raised users friend limit to one hundred fifty and then to five hundred.
After all of this effort they couldn’t save the program and announced this shocking news to their loyal users and they announced in their website the schedule of shutting down:
The specific shutdown schedule is as below:
– 9.17.2018 : Notice on Path service discontinuation
– 10.1.2018: Unable to download/update the app in iTunes and Google Play
– 10.18.2018: Termination of the Service (Unable to access to Path)
– 11.15.2018: Path related customer service will be closed
a lot of us shared this journey with them and had a wonderful memories with our friends and we were able to know a new friends through this program, we considered this program as a diary. In the end we sincerely appreciated all of their efforts for saving the program
Done in 26 September
:References
- Path is website available at: https://path.com/about (Accessed:26 September 2018)
- Path wikipedia available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network) (Accessed: 17 September 2018)
- Business Insider available at:https://www.businessinsider.com/kakao-talk-buys-path-2015-5 (Accessed:26 September 2018))
Aljoharah-DICU 